this was all human sweat. I took a plastic bottle of water from Savannah and put it to my mouth, squeezed it flat, the water going straight down my throat. “I was given the baby name of We-sa at birth. Sometimes Gvhe. Then Dalonige’ i Digadoli, Yellowrock Golden Eyes.” I stopped.
“The white man gave you the name of Jane Doe. Later you added Yellowrock, yes?”
I nodded. Dalonige’ i meant gold, the gold dug from the mountains and found in the creeks. The gold the white man wanted so badly that he stole tribal land and sent the tribes west on the Trail of Tears. The yellow eyes because skinwalker irises were yellowish. Neither were traditional or clan names. “And I’ve been Janie and Legs and Leo’s Enforcer and Killer and Dark Queen.”
“If you could rename yourself with any word that best fits who you are now, what would it be?”
Beast is better than Jane alone and puma alone, Beast thought at me. Beast is more. Beast is us.
Ahhhh . . . , I thought. “Beast.”
“Beast. There is no Tsalagi word with the exact connotation as the English Beast. A better name might be Tlvdatsi,” Savannah suggested, “panther. Since the human part of you is dying.”
I had been a panther for far longer than I had ever been Jane, but that name was not quite right. “Beast,” I said. “Just Beast.”
The Elder tilted her head in acquiescence. “To find healing,” Savannah said softly, “we must accept what we are. For me it is to accept that I failed my child. That all my pride will always be false. That any success will always carry the taint of my failure. Do you accept that you are Beast? For the sake of healing, will you take that name for yourself for a time, as a reminder of personal sacrifice and strength?”
I breathed out a laugh, more whisper than anything else. “I’m not going to try to get that put on my driver’s license, but sure. Yes. We are Beast. Not that I know what to do with a name.”
I had slipped, but she didn’t react to the pronoun we. “There is power in self-acceptance,” she said. “In ceremony to change names.”
“Who are you, then?” I asked.
“I have been, for many years, Udalvquodi. Arrogant,” she translated for me. “I am now Unastisgi. Crazy. I do not know what I will become after I have moved through the liminality between one part of being and the next.”
“What?” I asked, a stack of memories suddenly squirming at the back of my mind like worms on a fishhook.
At the expression on my face she went on. “All the worlds line up and down and all around, like the small pockets of a honeycomb.” Savannah held up her hands, slightly cupped, and showed how the cups of a honeycomb rest one on the others in a pattern of strength and solidarity. “You, Beast, sit in the liminality between one part of being and the next. You are becoming a new thing. Hence the ceremony name.”
“Liminality,” I whispered. “That was it.”
One of my stacked and squirming memories came clear to me. It was a conversation I had with Rick’s cousin, Sarge Walker, a pilot who lived outside of Chauvin, Louisiana, south of Houma. He’d been talking about liminal lines and liminal thresholds. I had said to him, “I’ve heard of sites and places on Earth where the fabric of reality is thin, where one reality can bleed into another. Places where the coin stack of universes meet and mesh and sometimes things can cross over from one reality to another.”
Sarge had replied, “Liminal thresholds are theoretical, the type of conjecture toyed with when physicists have drinking parties and alcohol loosens their tongues.”
“I was told that the Earth has three liminal lines. They supposedly curve across the Earth. One starts in southwest Mexico, curves across the Gulf of Mexico to Chauvin, Louisiana, then follows the Appalachians east and north in a curve like the trade winds sometimes make, but more stable, static, bigger, and smoother. Then it curves across the ocean.”
The memory faded, leaving behind the beginning of . . . something. Wisdom. A solution. A memory of an arcenciel long before current time.
I had been in Louisiana, and was now, once again, in the Appalachians, two places where one of the biggest liminal lines ran. A place where Beast had once seen a young arcenciel and let the young one eat her dinner. That realization made my salted pelt